Roxane Gay

Before the doctor entered, his assistant, an intern, took down my vital information. I was weighed, measured, quietly judged

I was broken. I was changed.

What I went through was bad, but it wasn’t that bad

I have learned to live with my trauma.

survival didn’t look like much

allowed me to break down my trauma into something more manageable, into something I could carry with me instead of allowing the magnitude of it to destroy me.

But, in the long run, diminishing my experience hurt me far more than it helped. I created an unrealistic measure for what was acceptable in how I was treated in relationships, in friendships, in random encounters with strangers. That is to say that if I even had a bar for how I deserved to be treated, that bar was so low it was buried far belowground

Everything was terrible but none of it was that bad.

The list of ways I allowed myself to be

The list of ways I allowed myself to be treated badly grew into something I could no longer carry, not at all.